Sarah E. Dennis, Ph.D.

Personal Tutoring

Private Assessing & Tutoring:

In addition to providing professional development for teachers, I also assess and tutor children, both in person and virtually using Skype or FaceTime.

My expertise is reading comprehension and vocabulary. I can assess your child's vocabulary, reading comprehension, and affect towards reading, and provide you with information for ways you can support your child's reading and language development. Alternately, I can tutor your child regularly, and assess in ongoing ways to measure our progress and growth.

With a bachelors in early childhood/elementary education, a Masters in Literacy, and a doctorate in Education, I have spent nearly 15 years teaching educators how to teach children to read. During many of those years I have also tutored children one-on-one, children from first grade-eighth grade.

I can come to your home, meet at a library or other public place, or you can travel to my home (near Irving Park and Pulaski). I can also provide assessment and tutoring virtually.

I look forward to hearing from you to discuss ways I might be able to support your child's literacy development.﻿

Testimonials:

"Sarah did a terrific job tutoring our 10 year-old, fourth-grade daughter. Sarah has a very high skill level and is able to hit the ground running! She quickly established rapport with our daughter and then was able to clearly identify the most important areas on which to focus. The tools that she uses to assess literacy and reading skills allow her to track our daughter's progress. Our daughter was reading/decoding words at grade level, but often didn't understand and/or couldn't recall what she had read. Sarah helped her learn how to slow down and gave her concrete tools that have guided her to become a better reader, who knows how to process what she's reading. We've been very impressed with the significant gains that our daughter has made in just ten weeks. We see the results of her work with Sarah every day, as she reads. We'd highly recommend Sarah as a reading tutor!" - Parent of a 4th Grader (3/16).﻿

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"I wanted to thank you again. I truly believe (my child) has benefited from your teaching. He shocked me this weekend when he explained some methods of reading comprehension he had learned from you. Thank you very much! You don't know how much it means to me when I see him succeed.” (June 2010)

“I really enjoyed watching him read last summer. He would laugh, and yell, "Nooooooooooo!" when things were taking a turn on the story plot. So I knew he was finally visualizing the story. I believe all of it is thanks to you. You don't know how grateful I am to have you as his tutor.” (Sept 2010)

“[My child] will be graduating High School this year and he plans on going to college out of state and then to Medical school. I truly believe you had a big part in his academic development... (Feb 2016) - Parent of a 6th/7th grader, tutored 2010 - 2011﻿

"As a family who just started working with Sarah, we have nothing but praise regarding our first few sessions with our daughter. She is entering fifth grade.

Sarah really took time to get to know our daughter first. The rest has flowed and she has been able to target some new areas to pursue and also enhance and develop existing skills. She creates a comfortable vibe and relates easily. My daughter looks forward to meeting and is putting these efforts to practice already.

Reading is a foundation to so much more than just reading class in school. It will help as our daughter takes on additional subjects each year, with new textbooks in school and with pesky word problems in math!!

We really like Sarah's approach and highly recommend her services!!!!!"Parent of a 5th grader (July 2016)